IN SECTIONS 5 to 8 of Chapter XIV, various forms were described which a
discarnate life after death, if there is such, might conceivably take. Another
possible form of survival, namely life, incarnate again, of the "essential" part
of a personality through rebirth in a new human or possibly animal body, was
also mentioned but was not discussed there since Part IV was concerned only with
the question of discarnate life after death. In the present and the subsequent
chapters of Part V, we return to that very interesting conception of survival,
and examine it in some detail.
The content of the belief that the individual "soul" lives in a body on earth
not once only but several times has been designated by various names.
Metempsychosis, Transmigration, Reincarnation, and Rebirth are the most
familiar, but Reembodiment, Metensomatosis, and Palingenesis have also been
used. The doctrine has taken a variety of specific forms, some of which will be
considered farther on; but there is little warrant either in etymology or in any
firmly established usage for regarding one or another of those names as denoting
only some particular form of the doctrine that the individual "soul" lives on
earth not once only but several times.(1)
(1) "Rebirth," "Reembodiment," "Reincarnation," and "Transmigration," are
self-explanatory. "Metempsychosis" is from the Greek meta = after, successive, +
empsychoō = to animate, from en = in + psyche = spirit, soul; "Palingenesis,"
from palin = again, anew, + genesis = birth, gignomai = to be born; "Metensomatosis,"
from meta = after, successive, + en = in, + soma = body.
The conception of survival as metempsychosis seems fantastic and unplausible to
the great majority of people today in Europe and America, notwithstanding that
the believers in survival among them conceive life after death in terms either
more fantastic or merely nebulous. And implausibility - distinguished from
grounded improbability - means little else than that the doctrine a person
characterizes as implausible is one he has not been accustomed to see treated
seriously.
The idea of metempsychosis has appealed to vast numbers of persons in Asia and,
even in the West, has commended itself to a number of its most distinguished
thinkers from ancient times to the present. In this chapter, we shall cite
briefly what some of them have said on the subject. It has in most cases been
phrased by them in terms of the words "soul" or "spirit," which we shall retain
in presenting their views, instead of using "mind" or "personality" as in our
preceding chapters.
Then, in subsequent chapters, we shall examine the objections to which the
hypothesis of reincarnation appears open, and the ways, if any, in which they
might be met. Finally, we shall consider the facts, such as they are, which have
been alleged to constitute evidence of the reality of survival conceived as
reincarnation.
1. W. R. Alger, on the importance of the doctrine of metempsychosis
The
importance of the doctrine of Metempsychosis in the history of mankind may be
gathered from the statement with which the Rev. W. R. Alger, a learned Unitarian
clergyman of the last century, opens the discussion of the subject in his
monumental work, A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life. "No other
doctrine," he declares, "has exerted so extensive, controlling, and permanent an
influence upon mankind as that of the metempsychosis, - the notion that when the
soul leaves the body it is born anew in another body, its rank, character,
circumstances and experience in each successive existence depending on its
qualities, deeds, and attainments in its preceding lives."(2)
(2) Op. Cit, p. 475, Tenth Edition, Boston 1880; preface dated 1878.
Alger cites authority for the fact that at the time of his writing, the
adherents of the transmigration doctrine in one or another of the more specific
forms under which it has been conceived numbered some six hundred and fifty
million; and, in order to account for what he terms "the extent and the
tenacious grasp of this antique and stupendous belief" (p. 475), he mentions,
among other less potent reasons, the fact that "the theory of the transmigration
of souls is marvellously adapted to explain the seeming chaos of moral
inequality, injustice, and manifold evil presented in the world of human life
... Once admit the theory to be true, and all difficulties in regard to moral
justice vanish" (p. 481). Moreover, he writes, "the motive furnished by the
doctrine to self-denial and toil has a peerless sublimity" (p. 487).
Alger's book was published in 1860 and ran through ten editions in the course of
the succeeding twenty years. In the early editions, notwithstanding the high
merits he granted to the reincarnation theory, he apparently rejected it, on the
ground that, "destitute of any substantial evidence, it is unable to face the
severity of science" (p. 484). But in the fifth of six new chapters which in
1878 he adds in the tenth edition, he considers again the merits of the theory
and offers it - though, he emphasizes, in no dogmatic spirit (p. 739) - as
probably "the true meaning of the dogma of the resurrection" (p. 735); "the true
meaning of the doctrine of the general resurrection and judgment and eternal
life, as a natural evolution of history from within" (Preface, p. iv); pointing
out (p. 735) that "resurrection and transmigration agree in the central point of
a restoration of the disembodied soul to a new bodily existence, only the former
represents this as a single collective miracle wrought by an arbitrary stroke of
God at the close of the earthly drama, (whereas) the latter depicts it as
constantly taking place in the regular fulfilment of the divine plan in the
creation." The difference, he goes on, "is certainly, to a scientific and
philosophical thinker ... strongly in favor of the Oriental theory" (p. 735).
For, he somewhat rhapsodically declares, "the thoughts embodied in it are so
wonderful, the method of it so rational, the region of contemplation into which
it lifts the mind is so grand, the prospects it opens are of such universal
reach and import, that the study of it brings us into full sympathy with the
sublime scope of the idea of immortality and of a cosmopolitan vindication of
providence uncovered to everyone" (p. 739).
One virtue of the reincarnation hypothesis which Alger does not actually mention
concerns the "origin" of the individual human soul if the latter is conceived,
as generally by the religious, in spiritual not materialistic terms. For
reincarnation provides an alternative to the shocking supposition common among
Christians that, at the mating of any human pair, be it in wedlock or in wanton
debauch, an all-wise, almighty, and infinitely loving God creates outright from
nothing, or extracts from his own eternal being, an immortal human soul endowed
arbitrarily with a particular one out of many possible sets of latent capacities
and incapacities. In contrast with this the reincarnation theory says nothing
about absolute origins, for it finds no more difficulty in thinking of the
"soul" as unoriginated than in thinking of it as unending; that is, in
conceiving it as evolving from more primitive to more advanced stages, and as
extending thus from an infinite past into an infinite future. For if it is
conceivable that anything at all should have no absolute beginning, then it is
conceivable of a human spirit as easily as of a divine one.
2. Metempsychosis in Brahmanism and Buddhism
The transmigration theory, then,
presents to us the idea of a long succession of lives on earth for the
individual, each of them as it were a day in the school of experience, teaching
him new lessons through which he develops the capacities latent in human nature,
grows in wisdom, and eventually reaches spiritual maturity.
This idea has for many centuries been widely accepted in Asia. In Brahmanism,
the belief is held that the individual ego or spirit, the Atma, has lived in a
body on earth many times before the birth of its present body, and will do so
again and again after the death of that body; the bodies in which it incarnates
being human, or animal, or even vegetable ones according to its Karma, that is,
according to the destiny it generates for itself by its acts, its thoughts, and
its attitudes and aspirations; this evolutionary process continuing until the
individual Atma, at last fully developed, attains direct insight into its
identity with Brahman, the World Spirit, and thereby wins salvation from the
necessity of further rebirth.
In Buddhism, which, like Protestantism in Christianity, was a reform movement,
the belief in reincarnation and Karma carried over but with a difference which
at first seems paradoxical. For one of the chief teachings of the Buddha is the
Anatta doctrine - the doctrine namely, that man has no permanent Atma or ego,
but that the constituents of his nature are always in process of change, more or
less rapidly; and that his present being is related to the past beings he calls
his, only in being continuous with them as effect is continuous with cause. In
Buddhism, the culmination of the long chain of lives, each generating the next,
is therefore not described as realization of the identity of Atma and Brahma,
but as extinction of the three "fires" - that is, of craving, ill-will, and
ignorance - which, as long as they persist, bring about re-birth. Their
extinction is the extinction which the word Nirvana signifies.
3. Pythagoras and Empedocles
But the idea of preexistence, and of repeated
incarnations through which the individual progresses has commended itself not
only to the minds of men in Asia, but also to numerous eminent thinkers in the
West, both ancient and modern.
One of the earliest was Pythagoras, who flourished about 455 B.C. and is
believed to have travelled extensively in the East, perhaps as far as India.
Little is known with certainty concerning his views, but Ueberweg, in the first
volume of his History of Philosophy, states that "all that can be traced with
certainty to Pythagoras himself is the doctrine of metempsychosis and the
institution of certain religious and ethical regulations." The exact nature of
his conception of metempsychosis is not known, but an anecdote reported by
Diogenes Laertius - according to which Pythagoras allegedly recognized the soul
of a deceased friend of his in the body of a dog that was being beaten - suggests
that Pythagoras believed that the human soul was reborn at least sometimes in
the bodies of animals. Another Greek philosopher of about the same period,
namely, Empedocles, also held to some form of the doctrine of the transmigration
of souls(3).
(3) Ueberweg, op. cit. English Trans. 1, pp. 42-63. Scribner's, N.Y., 1898.
4. Plato
But the greatest of the Greek philosophers who taught the doctrine of
periodical reincarnation of souls is of course Plato. In the Phaedrus, he writes
that the human soul, according to the degree of vision of truth to which it has
attained. is reborn in a correspondingly suitable body: "The soul which has seen
most of truth shall come to the birth as a philosopher or artist, or musician or
lover; that which has seen truth in the second degree shall be a righteous king
or warrior or lord; the soul which is of the third class shall be a politician
or economist or trader; the fourth shall be a lover of gymnastic toils or a
physician ..." and so on, down to the ninth degree, to which birth as a tyrant
is appropriate - Plato adding that "all these are states of probation, in which
he who lives righteously improves, and he who lives unrighteously deteriorates
his lot." In another passage Plato says that the soul of a man "may pass into
the life of a beast, or from the beast again into the man," but that a soul
which has never beheld true being will not pass into the human form, since that
vision "was the condition of her passing into the human form."(4) In the tenth
book of another of the dialogues, The Republic, Plato, sets forth similar ideas.
He tells of a mythical warrior, called Er, who had been left for dead on the
field of battle but who returned to life ten days afterwards and related that he
had seen the souls of men awaiting rebirth, beholding a great variety of
available lives open to them, and drawing lots as to who would choose first, who
next, and so on. Some chose, according to such folly or wisdom as they had, one
or another sort of human life; but here too Plato holds to the possibility of
rebirth of a man in animal form, saying that Er saw the soul of Orpheus choose
the life of a swan, that of Ajax the life of a lion, that of Agamemnon that of
an eagle, and so on.(5)
(4) Phaedrus, Jowett's translation, pp. 248-249, Scribner's, N.Y., 1908.
(5) The Republic, Jowett's translation, pp. 614, 617-20.
5. Plotinus
The next of the great thinkers whose views on reincarnation may be
mentioned is the Neo-Platonist, Plotinus, (204-269 A.D.) who was educated in
Alexandria under Ammonius Saccas and taught at Rome for some twenty-five years
during the middle of the third century, A.D.; and whose philosophical ideas
influenced many of the early shapers of Christian theology. In his treatise on
The Descent of the Soul, he sets forth a view of the education of the soul
through repeated births in a material body. The soul, he writes, "confers
something of itself on a sensible nature, from which likewise it receives
something in return ... By a "sensible" nature, Plotinus means here a nature
perceptible to the senses, that is, a body. He goes on to say that the soul ...
through an abundance of sensible desire ... becomes profoundly merged into
matter and no longer totally abides in the universal soul. Yet our souls are
able alternately to rise from hence carrying back with them an experience of
what they have known and suffered in their fallen state; from whence they will
learn how blessed it is to abide in the intelligible world," that is, in the
world of abstract forms, which cannot be perceived by the senses but only
apprehended by the intellect, and which are the objects of what Plato called the
vision of truth, or of true being. Plotinus goes on to say that the soul, "by a
comparison, as it were of contraries, will more plainly perceive the excellence
of a superior state. For the experience of evil produces a clearer knowledge of
good, especially where the power of judgment is so imbecil, that it cannot
without such experience obtain the science of that which is best."(6)
(6) Five Books of Plotinus, translated by Thos. Taylor, London, 1794, pp.
279-80.
6. Origen
Among Christian thinkers of approximately the same period as Plotinus,
who like him believed in repeated earth lives for the soul, was Origen (c.
185-c. 254, A.D.) one of the Fathers of the Church most influential in the early
developments of Christian theology. He held not only, like some of the other
theologians of that period, that the human soul preexisted and in some sense
lived prior to its entrance into the body, but also that after death it
eventually reentered a new body, and this repeatedly until, fully purified, it
was fit to enter heaven. This doctrine was later condemned by the second Council
of Constantinople, but the following passage, from the Latin translation by
Rufinus of Origen's Greek text, of which only a fragment of the original passage
remains, leaves no doubt that Origen professed it: "Everyone, therefore, of
those who descend to the earth is, according to his deserts or to the position
that he had there, ordained to be born in this world either in a different
place, or in a different nation, or in a different occupation, or with different
infirmities, or to be descended from religious or at least less pious parents;
so as sometimes to bring about that an Israelite descends among the Scythians,
and a poor Egyptian is brought down to Judaea."(7)
(7) Origen: De Principiis IV Cap. 3, 10, 26, 23. The Latin of Rufinus'
translation is given as follows on p. 338 of Vol. 5 of Die Griechischen
Christlichen Schriftsteller der Ersten Drei Jahrhunderte: Unusquisque ergo
descendentium in terram pro meritis vel loco suo, quem ibi habuerat, dispensatur
in hoc mundo in diversis veI locis vel gentibus vel conversationibus vel
infirmitatibus nasci vel a religiosis ant certe minus piis parentibus generari,
ita ut inveniat aliquando Israheliten in Scythas descendere et Aegyptium
pauperem deduci ad Iudaeam.
The fragment, which is all we have of Origen's own Greek of the passage, reads:
kai para toisde ē toisde tois patrasin ōs dynasthai pote Israēlitēn pasein eis
Schythas kai Aigypton eis tēn Ioudaian katelthein.
7. The Jews, Egyptians, Celts, and Teutons
Having alluded in what precedes to
the influence of Neo-Platonism and in particular of Plotinus on the early
Christian theologians, it may not be amiss to mention briefly two or three
statements in the new Testament, which have often been cited as indicating that
belief in preexistence and rebirth was not uncommon among the persons to whom
Jesus spoke, and indeed as suggesting that perhaps he himself accepted it or at
least regarded it as plausible.
In the ninth chapter of the Gospel according to St. John, we have the story of
the man born blind, whom Jesus saw as he passed by. "His disciples asked him,
'Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" Jesus
answered. "It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works
of God might be made manifest in him." The point is that the answer of Jesus
does not deny that the man could have sinned before birth, but denies only that
this actually was the cause of his blindness. More explicit and positive is the
assertion by Jesus, twice reported in the Gospel according to St. Matthew, that
John the Baptist was Elijah: "And if you are willing to accept it, he is Elijah
who is to come. He who has ears to hear, let him hear." And farther on: "But I
tell you that Elijah has already come, and they did not know him, but did to him
whatever they pleased... Then the disciples understood that he was speaking to
them of John the Baptist" (XVII, 12, 13).
At all events, the doctrine of the transmigration of souls was a part of the
Jewish esoteric mystical philosophy known as the Kabbala, the origin of which is
very ancient, apparently antedating even the Christian era. The doctrine is
mentioned in the later Zoharistic works, but "is never found systematically
developed" there; rather, wherever it occurs, it is tacitly assumed as well
known, and no explanation is given in detail(8). The following passage is quoted
from the Zohar (ii, 99b) by C. D. Ginsburg: "All souls are subject to
transmigration, and men do not know the ways of the Holy One, blessed be he;
they do not know that they are brought before the tribunal, both before they
enter into this world and after they quit it, they are ignorant of the many
transmigrations and secret probations which they have to undergo ... But the
time is at hand when these mysteries will be disclosed."(9) The same author, in
a footnote (p. 125) writes: "According to Josephus, the doctrine of the
transmigration of souls into other bodies ... was also held by the Pharisees ...
restricting, however, the metempsychosis to the righteous.
And though the Midrashin and the Talmud are silent about it, yet from Saadia's
vituperation against it ... there is no doubt that this doctrine was held among
some Jews in the ninth century of the present era. At all events it is perfectly
certain that the Karaite Jews firmly believed in it ever since the seventh
century ... St. Jerome assures us that it was also propounded among the early
Christians as an esoteric and traditional doctrine which was entrusted to the
select few; ... and Origen was convinced that it was only by means of this
doctrine that certain Scriptural narratives, such as the struggle of Jacob with
Esau before their birth, the reference to Jeremiah when still in his mother's
womb, and many others, can possibly be explained.'
(8) M. Caster: Hastings Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, Art.
Transmigration, p. 439. Cf. G. SchoIem: Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. Schoken Pub. House, Jerusalem, 1947 pp. 281 ff.
(9) The Essenes, The Kabbalah, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1955, pp.
124-5.
In the ancient world, the belief in reincarnation was anyway widespread.
Herodotus, Plato, and other Greek writers report it of the Egyptians of their
time; Herodotus, for example, writing (Bk. II, Sec. 123): "... the Egyptians
were the first to teach that the human soul is immortal, and at the death of the
body enters into some other living thing then coming to birth; and after passing
through all creatures, of land, sea, and air (which cycle it completes in three
thousand years) it enters once more into a human body at birth. Some of the
Greeks, early and late, have used this doctrine as if it were their own..."(10)
(10) Bk. III. Sec. 123. Tr. by. A. D. Godley, Putnam's N. Y. 1921.
Both Caesar and Valerius Maximus definitely state that the Druids of ancient
Gaul held the belief in reincarnation; and there is evidence also that it was
present among the early Teutonic peoples.
8. Hume
Let us' however, now turn to more recent times and see what some
eminent modern philosophers have had to say concerning metempsychosis. The first
I shall mention is one of the greatest in the history of modem thought-the skeptical philosopher, David Hume. In one of his essays, he emphasizes on the
one hand the weakness of the metaphysical and of the moral arguments for the
immortality of the soul, and on the other, the strength of the physical
arguments for its mortality; and he then concludes the passage with the
statement that "the Metempsychosis is therefore the only system of this kind
[that is, the only conception of immortality] that philosophy can hearken
to."(11)
(11) Essays and Treatises on Various Subjects, Boston, 1881. Second of the two,
Essays on Suicide, p. 228. p. 162.
9. Kant
Another and no less famous philosopher, who also gave some thought to
the idea of preexistence and of rebirth, was Immanuel Kant. In a passage of his
celebrated Critique of Pure Reason, he notes that "generation in the human race
depends on ... many accidents, on occasion, ... on the views and whims of
government, nay, even on vice;" and he remarks that 'It is difficult to believe
in the eternal existence of a being whose life has first begun under
circumstances so trivial, and so entirely dependent on our own choice." Kant
then points out that the strangeness, which attaches to the supposition that so
important an effect arises from such insignificant causes, would disappear if we
should accept the hypothesis that the life of the human spirit is "not subject
to the changes of time ... neither beginning in birth, nor ending in death," and
that the life of the body, which so begins and so ends, "is phenomenal only;"
that is to say, if we should accept the hypothesis that "if we could see
ourselves and other objects as they really are, we should see ourselves in a
world of spiritual natures, our community with which did neither begin at our
birth nor will end with the death of the body."(12) Indeed, a more recent
philosopher, James Ward, who in his Gifford Lectures calls attention to this
passage, states in a note that Kant, in his lectures on metaphysics shortly
before the publication of the Critique, dogmatically taught both the preexistence and the immortality of the soul.(13)
(12) Critique of Pure Reason, M. Mueller's Trawl. MacMillan's 2nd ed. pp. 625-6.
(13) James Ward, The Realm of Ends, p. 404.
10. Fichte
Another German philosopher, Fichte, contrasts the spiritual part of
himself, which he conceives as the will to obey the laws of reason, with the
sensuous other part, and conjectures that the latter may have the form of a
succession of incarnate lives. He writes: "These two orders, - the purely
spiritual and the sensuous, the latter consisting possibly of an innumerable
series of particular lives, - have existed in me from the first moment of the
development of my active reason ... My sensuous existence may, in future, assume
other forms, but these are just as little the true life, as its present
form."(14)
(14) The Vocation of Man, Bk. III, Trawl. by Wm. Smith, Pub. London 1848.
11. Schopenhauer
Another German philosopher, Schopenhauer, had some
acquaintance with the thought of India, and a good deal of sympathy with certain
of its features-in particular with its doctrine of repeated births. In the third
volume of his great work, The World as Will and Idea, he has a chapter on "Death
and its relation to the indestructibility of our true nature." This true nature
he conceives to be not the intellect, which is mortal, but "the character, i.e.,
the will" which is "the eternal part" of us and comes again and again to new
births. This doctrine, he goes on, is "more correctly denoted by the word palingenesis [that is, new births] than by metempsychosis- since the latter term
suggests that what is reborn is the whole psyche, whereas not the intellectual
part of it, but only the will, is born again.(15)
(15) Vol. 111:300, Haldane and Kemp's translation. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner
Co. London, 1906.
12. Renouvier
One of the most distinguished French philosophers of recent
times, Charles Renouvier, also endorses the doctrine of reincarnation. In the
course of the exposition of his elaborate theory of monads, of indestructible
germs, and of the origin and destiny of personality, he writes: "But it is not
once only that each person must live again on earth owing to the actualization
of one of those seminal potencies; it is a certain number of times, we do not
know how many ..." And again, speaking of the several individuals which are the
several lives of one person, he writes: "These individuals, whom memory does not
tie together, and who have to one another no earthly genealogical relationships,
also have no memory of the person whom each of them comes to continue on earth.
Such forgetting is a condition of any theory of preexistence ... the person,
reintegrated in the world of ends, recovers there the memory of its state in the
world of origins, and of the diverse lives which it has gone through, in the
course of which it has received the lessons and undergone the trials of the life
of pain."(16)
(16) Le Personnalisme, pp. 125-126. Felix Alcan, Paris 1903.
13. McTaggart
To be mentioned next in our partial list of recent and
contemporary eminent thinkers who have regarded with favor the theory of
metempsychosis are three distinguished British philosophers. The first is John
McTaggart, who in 1906 published a book entitled Some Dogmas of Religion. The
whole of its fourth chapter is devoted to a discussion of the idea of human preexistence. He states that this "renders the doctrine of a plurality of lives
more probable." This doctrine "would, indeed, be in any case the most probable
form of the doctrine of immortality" (p xiii). Farther on, McTaggart points out
that if both preexistence and immortality are true, then "each man would have at
least three lives, his present life, one before it, and one after it. It seems
more probable, however, that this would not be all, and that his existence
before and after his present life would in each case be divided into many lives,
each bounded by birth and death." And he adds that there is much to be said for
the view that [such] a plurality of lives would be the most probable
alternative, even on a theory of immortality which did not include preexistence
(p. 116).(17)
(17) Op. Cit. London. Edw. Arnold, 1906.
14. Ward
James Ward, cited above as having called attention to what Kant had to
say on the subject of the human spirit's existence before the birth and after
the death of its body, himself considers various theories of a future life in
the 18th of his Gifford lectures. One of these theories is that of
metempsychosis. He examines some of the chief objections to it which have been
advanced, and he suggests more or less plausible ways in which they may be met.
He concludes that "we must at least insist ... that if such life [to wit, a
future life] is to have any worth or meaning, a certain personal continuity of
development is essential. From this point of view, death becomes indeed a longer
sleep dividing life from life as sleep divides day from day; and as there is
progress from day to day so too there may be from life to life."(18)
(18) The Realm of Ends, Cambridge Univ. Press N.Y. 1911, p. 407.
15. Broad
Lastly, the distinguished Cambridge philosopher, C. D. Broad, at the
end of his discussion of the empirical arguments which may be advanced in
support of the idea of survival after death, points out that the hypothesis as
to what specifically may survive, which he has himself offered, "has certain
advantages for those who favor the theory of metempsychosis, as Dr. McTaggart
does."(19) And, in a later work where at one point he discusses what McTaggart
says on the subject, Broad states that, to himself, the theory of preexistence
and plurality of lives seems to be one "which ought to be taken very seriously,
both on philosophical grounds and as furnishing a reasonable motive for right
action .... We shall behave all the better if we act on the assumption that we
may survive; that actions which tend to strengthen and enrich our characters in
this life will probably have a favorable influence on the dispositions with
which we begin our next lives; and that actions which tend to disintegrate our
characters in this life will probably cause us to enter on our next life "halt
and maimed." If we suppose that our future lives will be of the same general
nature as our present lives, this postulate, which is in itself intelligible and
not unreasonable, gains enormously in concreteness and therefore in practical
effect on our conduct.(20)
(19) The Mind and its Place in Nature. Harcourt Brace & Co. New York, 1929, p.
551.
(20) Examination of McTaggart's Philosophy. Cambridge, University Press 1938, p.
639
The preceding citations from authors who have expressed opinions favorable in
various degrees to the idea of reincarnation have been limited to philosophers,
and even so have not included all those who could be listed. But numerous poets
also have viewed the doctrine sympathetically. Persons interested to know what
these have had to say, or in citations from various other quarters of opinions
commendatory of the doctrine of rebirth, will find quotations in several fairly
accessible books, among which may be mentioned E. D. Walker's Reincarnation, A
Study of Forgotten Truth, G. de Purucker's The Esoteric Tradition, and Paul Siwek's
La Reincarnation des Esprits.(21)
(21) Respectively, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1888; Theosophical University
Press, Point Loma, Calif., 1935, Vol. II, Chs. XIX, XX, pp. 620-47; Desclee de
Brouwer, Rio de Janeiro, 1942, Introduction and Part I.
16. Various forms of the doctrine of reincarnation
Some of the statements which
have been quoted in what precedes will have indicated that believers in
reincarnation do not all conceive the doctrine in exactly the same manner. Many
of them, for example, believe that a man may be reborn as an animal, and hence
that some of the animals are animated by souls which have been and probably
again will some time be lodged in human bodies. Others believe that once a soul
has reached the human level, it will not thereafter be reborn as an animal.
Again, differences of opinion exist as to the interval of time between
incarnations. For example, L. A. Waddell, who accompanied the expedition of Sir
Francis Younghusband to Tibet at the beginning of the present century, and who
has written extensively on the religion of the Tibetan Lamas, mentions that when
the Dalai Lama dies, the selection of his successor is based on the belief that
his spirit is immediately reincarnated as a new born infant(22). Search is then
made for a child born at that time, to whom certain additional tests are then
applied.
(22) Lhasa and its Mysteries, Dutton and Co., N. Y. 1905, p. 28.
Other believers in reincarnation hold that a long interval normally elapses
between two incarnations - centuries, or indeed sometimes a thousand years or
more - and offer accounts of the manner in which they think the discarnate soul
employs these lengthy periods.
Another interesting form of the belief in reincarnation is that held, according
to Delafosse, by one of the West African tribes, the Mandingos. They do not
think of reincarnation as universal. They believe that the spirit of a dead man,
which they call his niama "can reside where it likes - in the corpse, in the hut,
in a sacred object, or in the body of a living being whose niama it absorbs."
The spirit of a man for whom the due rites have not been performed may
reincarnate itself in a solitary animal, or in a human being, who goes mad."(23)
This particular version of the idea of reincarnation is interesting as being
virtually identical with the familiar ideas of "obsession" or "possession";
although, in these as traditionally conceived, what incarnates temporarily in
the "possessed" person, is not, as in the Mandingo belief, a discarnate human
spirit, but a devil. Some West African tribes more easterly than the Mandingos
apparently do not conceive reincarnation in this manner, but in its ordinary
sense, according to which the body the discarnate human spirit enters is that of
a child about to be born, not an adult body with a spirit of its own that has to
be displaced or is made insane by the invasion of another spirit. A conception
of reincarnation similar to that of the Mandingos appears in some of the
communications of automatists emanating purportedly from discarnate spirits. For
example, in Ch. XV of a book entitled Thirty Years Among the Dead,(24) the
author, Dr. C. A. Wickland, transcribes communications, uttered by his wife
while entranced, from purported spirits who said that during life they had had
some acquaintance with the teachings of modem Theosophy and [apparently
misconceiving these] that they endeavored to reincarnate by invading the bodies
of several of Dr. Wickland's patients. These, as in the Mandingos' belief, had
gone mad, i.e., seemingly obsessed or possessed by some personality other than
their own.
(23) Delafosse, Haut-Senegal-Niger, Ill, 165 quoted in
Hastings' Encyclopedia of
Religion and Ethics, Art. Transmigration.
(24) Spiritualist Press, London, no date.
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